Hi I have a model testing question for a object recognition project i am working on. I want to be able to take .jpeg files I have in my eclipse project folder and reduce them to very sparse byte arrays in Java. For example if I had a picture of a ball I would like to be able to convert it to the following byte 2-D array:

If someone could be so kind as to explain how I can do this most efficiently I would greatly appreciate it. I am fairly new to programming and do not understand much more than oop so if you could describe the process in simple programming terms without any jargon I would really appreciate it.